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David Auburn to Write 'Discovery of Witches' for Warner Bros.

The playwright will adapt Deborah Harkness' supernatural fantasy novel for the studio.

Playwright David Auburn has been tapped to pen A Discovery of Witches, Warner Bros.’s adaptation of the supernatural fantasy novel by history professor Deborah Harkness.

Denise Di Novi and Alison Greenspan are producing.

Published by Viking Adult in February 2011, the book centered on a scholarly woman who is a direct descendant of the first woman executed at the Salem Witch Trials that accidentally discovers a long-lost manuscript that may contain the secret of immortality. She is thrust into a position where she and a 1,500 year old vampire must stop an inter-species war between witches and vampires.

Warners picked up the book, part of a planned trilogy, last July as it tries to find movies to partly fill in the fantasy terrain left vacant by its Harry Potter franchise.

Auburn's play Proof won a Pulitzer and Tony and his first original follow-up play is The Columnist, which opens this April with John Lithgow in the lead and direction by Dan Sullivan.

Screenwise, the writer, who wrote the Sandra Bullock-Keanu Reeves romancer The Lake House for Warners, most recently worked on The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein for Ghost House. The project is currently on the hunt for a director.